The Floating Red Couch is the couch parked squarely in front of my 42" Sony LCD. It is the site of most of my observations about cinema and media and et cetera over the last five or so years. It is covered with dog hair and baby germs.

Aug 23, 2010

(500) Days of Summer (On Goddesses and Weenies)

Some men romanticize love....and take their frustrations about its imperfections out on the women that have the misfortune of finding themselves in a  relationship with these these men.

I am not sexually attracted to Zooey Deschanel, but I find her unbearably adorable.  She is the eponymous Summer and she is too damn cute for words.  Summer is hip, stylish, and appropriately pragmatic in the ways of love and life considering that she is in her 20's.

Joey G-L plays Tom Hansen, the awkward emo protagonist that is too self-absorbed to see that the reason his g/f doesn't like him is because he's too self-absorbed.  Of course, he's surrounded by buddies  (Geoffrey Arend, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Chloe Moretz) that seem to only be interested in his love life, so that's not helping his problem of vanity.

The (500) Days of Summer are the epoch in which these two know each other: from the day that they meet to the day when Tom meets his next g/f.  

Through that time, Tom fixates on Summer, pours over every little detail about the nature of their relationship, and constantly worries about how she's treating him.  Theirs is a relationship doomed to die, not because it wasn't meant to be (I don't believe in fate) and not because they are sabotaged, but for reasons all together more chumpy.
Summer is a sophisticated, grounded, beautiful, old-soul, cute chick with savvy. 
Tom is a weenie.
Weenie


In my experience, weenies sometimes end up with the ethereal goddesses of the hipster world, but it never lasts because weenies are too concerned about how they are being treated or how what they're going to say at that exact moment will effect the rest of the world.

Weenies have no experience.  Etheral hipster goddesses do.  Weenies can't deal with that.  And the goddesses end up moving on.  

In my experience women like Summer, should they end up in a meaningful relationship with a weenie (Tom and Summer break up officially after about 300 days, so that's not a meaningful relationship), then the weenie is older than the goddess by like 10 years.  Maybe even divorced with a kid.  

Nothing makes a weenie more attractive like proof of a failed relationship.

Anyhoo, people love (500) DOS.  I was less smitten.  I don't think Joey G-L is jiving with me, the friends are hollow, and the non-traditional story-telling devices are hit and miss (there's a very annoying song and dance after he gets laid the first time [miss] but a very kewl sequence where he's depressed and the color drains from the frame [hit]).

miss
But, the best way to describe the schizm in this movie:
  • the movie really truly showcases the lovely and delightful Zooey Deschanel, with her big blue eyes and the charming way that she glides through ever shot and every frame.
  • the movie is focused on Joey G-L's character, and that's really annoying.  Summer is obviously the more interesting facet of this movie, but there has yet to be a movie made by a male director (in this case, newcomer Marc Webb) that effectively plumbs the mysteries of the ethereal goddesses of the earth.
The only thing that I know is that every time I see Joey G-L, I think of DJ Connor's best friend George in Roseanne.  And so it weirds me out a bit to see him shtuping Zooey.

She's waaaay too good for him.
Posted by The Floating Red Couch at 5:41 PM
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4 comments:

  1. I had heard so many good things about this film prior to viewing it myself, but I have to say that I was disappointed with it!
    I loved the fact that the ending was relatively realistic and I also loved the use of the colour blue to represent Summer's character. What I didn't like were the characters themselves - Their immaturity and so-called quirkiness became tiresome after a while. It was if they had yet to encounter the true stresses of life, so an infatuation had room to move in and take over their day to day thoughts. The film is by no means the worst, but I didn't see the brilliant oeuvre d'art that everyone else saw. It was charming in its own way...but also a little boring after a while.

    Give me 10 Things I Hate About You any day.

    Good review :) It's refreshing to hear that not everyone is enamoured with 500 Days!

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  2. Thank you, I was waiting for someone to express any opinion on this.

    I think people <3 this becuz they like She & Him and it seems like a good movie -- but, the lack of comments on a post that I thought for sure would lead people to kill me suggests that they're over it.

    Su8mmer is way faboo though. I could watch Zooey Deschanel read the phone book for three hours so long as she was tastefully lit.

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  3. I liked this movie a lot. I saw it as a brilliant deconstruction of the romantic comedy, playing upon a lot of the cliches of the genre and showing a much more realistic idea of what would probably happen in real life.

    I also think it speaks a lot to this idealized love a lot of people get stuck in their head and that Tom has and how it ultimately makes them unsatisfied and skews their perception of a relationship.

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  4. See, that right there is my problem with the film -- Tom

    Tom is a boring guy with boring interests that impose on his boring life desperately wanting this super attractive, worldly goddess to love that they both love The Smiths.

    I am just not interested in him, and, obviously, neither is Summer. I want a movie about Summer, not a movie about her creepy ex-b/f;'s fixation on her.

    I hope that his new g/f Autumn (har-dee-har-har) is a bondage freak with a gallery full of penetrating toys that she uses on him, and that he likes it, so that he can get a personality.

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